I only write about very important stuff on this blog! :) And here comes a particularly important entry.
What’s your number? If you ever got that question it probably was about how many millions you need to retire or something. I doubt it was about your degrees of separation from Albert Einstein or from the famous Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös in the context of research collaborators!
Mathematicians love numbers, however, and they have come up with the so-called Erdös number. If someone called X co-authored work with Paul Erdös, then X has an Erdös number equal to one. If you co-authored with X you have an Erdös number equal to two etc. etc.
Now, using the web site of the American Mathematical Society I found out that even though I am not a mathematician I actually have an Erdös number myself! And even better, I have an Einstein number as well!! Erdös wrote a lot of papers but Einstein did not. And Einstein died many decades before the more productive Erdös, so I would expect, ceteris paribus, that I would have a smaller Einstein number.
OK, so my Erdös#=5 and my Einsten#=7. Not the smallest numbers, but at least they are finite... And I like to point out that I am an empirical finance researcher, not a theoretician or a mathematician! And I only have six co-authors in total!
If you do not understand how important this is, google “Erdös number”! And perhaps you better google “irony” as well before you remove me from your RSS feed... I promise to be back with more on the global markets!